Jack Clayton

Jack Clayton
Born	(1921-03-01)1 March 1921 Brighton, England
Died	26 February 1995(1995-02-26) (aged 73) Berkshire, England
Occupation	Film director
Years active	1936 - 1992
Spouse(s)	Christine Norden (1947-1953) (divorced) Haya Harareet (?-1995) (his death) Katherine Kath (?-?) (divorced)

Jack Clayton (1 March 1921 – 26 February 1995) was a British film director, who specialised in bringing literary works to the screen.

Starting out as a teenage studio "tea boy" in 1935, Clayton worked his way up through British film industry in a career that spanned nearly 60 years. He rapidly rose through a series of increasingly important roles in British film production, before shooting to international prominence as a director with his Oscar-winning feature film debut, the landmark 1959 drama Room at the Top.

Clayton looked set for a brilliant future, and he was highly regarded by his peers, but a number of overlapping factors hampered his career. He was a notably 'choosy' director, and repeatedly turned down films (including Alien) that became huge hits for other directors. He was also dogged by bad luck - the Hollywood studios labelled him as 'difficult', and a string of films in the 1970s that fell victim to studio politics were either taken out of his hands, or cancelled in the final stages of preparation. In 1977, his current film was cancelled just two weeks before shooting was scheduled to begin, and a few months later he suffered a serious stroke, losing the ability to speak, and putting him out of action for five years. Although he worked almost constantly on a wide range of significant projects, most either never made it into production, or wound up being made by other directors. Clayton was only able to complete seven feature films in his 33 years as a director, but his work continues to be appreciated, and has been admired by peers like Martin Scorcese, Guillermo del Toro, Francois Truffaut, Tennessee Williams and Steven Spielberg.

Early life and career, 1921-1958

Born in Brighton, Clayton started his career as a child actor on the 1929 film Dark Red Roses. Giving up on his earlier aspiration to become a speed skater he joined Alexander Korda's Denham Film Studios in 1935 at the age of 14, and rose from tea boy to assistant director to film editor.

During the war years Clayton worked on many notable British features, including the first British Technicolor film Wings of the Morning (1937), and worked with visiting American directors, including Thornton Freeland on Over the Moon (1939) and Tim Whelan on Q Planes (1939). As a second assistant director he co-ordinated all three shooting units on Korda's lavish Technicolor fantasy The Thief of Baghdad (1940), having previously worked with Thief co-director Michael Powell on the noted "quota quickie" The Spy in Black (1939). He also gained invaluable editing experience assisting David Lean, who was the editor (and uncredited director) of the screen adaptation of Shaw's Major Barbara (1941).

While in service with the Royal Air Force during World War II, Clayton shot his first film, the documentary Naples is a Battlefield (1944), representing the problems in the reconstruction of Naples, the first great city liberated in World War II, ruined after Allied bombing and destruction caused by the retreating Nazis. After the war, he was second-unit director on Gordon Parry's Bond Street (1948) and production manager on Korda's An Ideal Husband (1947). Clayton then became an associate producer, working on several of the John and James Woolf's Romulus film productions including Moulin Rouge (1952) and Beat the Devil (1953), both directed by John Huston. Clayton worked with Laurence Harvey on both The Good Die Young (1954) and I Am a Camera (1955).

In 1956 he made his second film as a director, the Oscar winning short The Bespoke Overcoat (1956) for Romulus. Based on Wolf Mankowitz's theatrical version (1953) of Nikolai Gogol's short story The Overcoat (1842), in this film, Gogol's story is re-located to a clothing warehouse in the East End of London and the ghostly protagonist is a poor Jew.

Clayton also worked as producer a series of screen farces during 1956, including Three Men in a Boat (again with Laurence Harvey), followed by the thriller The Whole Truth, which starred Stewart Granger as a movie producer.

Directing career, 1959-1992

Room At The Top (1959)

In 1959, with funding from Romulus FIlms, Clayton directed his first full-length feature, Room at the Top (1959). Although it was the first and only occasion on which Clayton took over a project from another director, it was a huge critical and commercial success - it established Clayton as one of the hottest directors of his day, made a major star of lead actor Laurence Harvey, won a slew of awards at international film festivals, and was nominated for six Oscars (including Best Director), with Simone Signoret winning Best Actress, and scriptwriter Neil Paterson winning for Best Writing, Screenplay (Based on Material from Another Medium). A harsh indictment of the British class system that has been credited with spearheading Britain's movement toward realism in films, it inaugurated a series of realist films known as the British New Wave, which featured, for that time, unusually sincere treatments of sexual mores, and introduced a new maturity into British cinema, breaking new ground as the first British feature film to openly discuss sex.

The Innocents (1961)

Following this enormous success, Clayton was offered many prestige projects, including included Sons and Lovers, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The L-Shaped Room, but he turned them down, feeling that they too similar in style to Room at the Top. Setting a pattern that continued through the rest of his career, Clayton took a completely different tack with his second feature, on which he was both producer and director. The period ghost story The Innocents (1961) was an adaptation of the classic Henry James short story The Turn of the Screw, which Clayton had first read when he was 10. It starred Deborah Kerr in one of the best performances of her career, playing Miss Giddens, a repressed spinster who takes a job in a large English country houseas the governess to an orphaned brother and sister, and gradually comes to believe that her young charges are possessed by evil spirits. The film is also notable for the powerfully unsettling performances of the two juvenile leads, Martin Stephens (Miles) and Pamela Frankiln (Flora), an eerie score by renowned French composer Georges Auric and the lush black-and-white widescreen cinematography of Freddie Francis. The screenplay by Truman Capote (with uncredited contributions from John Mortimer) was mainly adapted from William Archibald's stage version of the story. Although not a major commercial hit, it earned positive reviews on release and its reputation has grown steadily over the years. Pauline Kael praised it as "one of the most elegantly beautiful ghost movies ever made", and veteran Daily Express reviewer Leonard Mosely wrote: "It is at least 20 years since I sat in a cinema and felt the skin crawling on the back of my head through sheer nervous tension, but I felt that creepy sensation once more this week. I was terrified by a film in which no blood is visibly shed and no graves are dug up." Both Freddie Francis and Truman Capote subsequently rated their work on the film as the best of their respective screen careers, and it has been lauded as a classic of psychological horror by many leading directors. Francois Truffaut, on spotting Clayton in a restaurant, famously sent him a note, scribbled on a napkin, which read, ""The Innocents is the best English film after Hitchcock goes to America.".

The Pumpkin Eater (1964)

His next film The Pumpkin Eater (1964) was another commercial flop, although it was widely acclaimed by critics, and earned star Anne Bancroft an Oscar Best Actress nomination. It also marked the first of five collaborations between Clayton and noted French composer Georges Delerue. The story examined the marital travails of a middle-aged woman (Bancroft), who becomes estranged from her philandering husband, a successful writer.

Our Mother's House (1967)

Clayton's fourth feature was an offbeat psychological drama about a family of children who conceal the fact that their single mother has died, and go on living in their house. Although it was a commercial failure, it received a glowing review from Roger Ebert on its release, earned star Dirk Bogarde a BAFTA Best Actor nomination, and Steven Spielberg later expressed great admiration for the film. It was adapted from the novel by Julian Gloag, and the original script was extensively revised prior to shooting by Clayton's third wife, actress Haya Harareet, It featured strong performances from Bogarde (who described the production as one of happiest experiences of his career) and from the ensemble cast of seven child actors, which included Pamela Franklin (Flora from The Innocents), Phoebe Nicholls, and Mark Lester. Like The Pumpkin Eater. The score was again composed by Georges Delerue, although he and Clayton would not work together for another fifteen years.

The Great Gatsby (1974)

The only film Clayton was able to make between 1968 and 1982 was his high-profile Hollywood production of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1974). Although it featured one of the hottest box-office stars of the period, Robert Redford in the title role, it did not fare well with the critics Tennessee Williams, in his book 'Memoirs' (p. 178), wrote: “It seems to me that quite a few of my stories, as well as my one acts, would provide interesting and profitable material for the contemporary cinema, if committed to ... such cinematic masters of direction as Jack Clayton, who made of The Great Gatsby a film that even surpassed, I think, the novel by Scott Fitzgerald.”

Career problems and unrealised projects

Despite his high critical standing, Clayton encountered repeated career setbacks after the release of Our Mother's House and over the next 15-years he was only able to complete one feature as a director (The Great Gatsby, in 1974). One reason was Clayton's approach to filmmaking - he was known for his discernment and taste, his painstaking and meticulous approach to his work, and his desire not to repeat himself - in his biographer's words, Clayton "never made a film he did not want to make". Consequently, he rejected many notable films in the wake of Room At The Top; in 1969, and despite his love of the book, he turned down the chance to direct They Shoot Horses, Don't They? because he did not want to take over a film that had already been prepared and cast, and was ready to shoot - although his decision opened up a career-making opportunity for his replacement, Sydney Pollack).

As biographer Neil Sinyard elucidates, Clayton worked intensively on many projects over this period, but most never came to fruition, for various reasons. Among the unfinished films Clayton worked on were:

• Sweet Autumn (1966), an original screenplay by Edna O'Brien, which was never made

• The Walking Stick (1968), from the novel by Winston Graham; Clayton was offered the project but had to decline due to the illness and subsequent death of his mother

• The Looking Glass War (1968-69) - Clayton was originally attached to direct the screen adaptation of the John Le Carré novel, with a script by his friend Mordecai Richler. Richler later claimed that he and Clayton walked off the project due to interference from Columbia Pictures (thereby earning Clayton a reputation for being 'difficult'.) although Richler's biographer Reinhold Kramer asserted that the main problem was that Clayton was unable to raise enough money to get the movie into production. After Clayton was taken off the project it was given to Frank L. Pierson, who jettisoned Richler's screenplay and made the film from his own adapted script.

• Zaharoff, Pedlar of Death (1969) was one of Clayton's most cherished projects, a biopic about the notorious early 20th century arms dealer Basil Zaharoff. It was originally slated to be made for Universal, and Clayton reportedly did an enormous amount of research for it, but it was never given approval. He tried to revive the project twice more, in 1978 and 1990, but was never able to get it made.

• The Tenant (1969–75) - Clayton was originally attached to make a film adaptation of Roland Topor's psychological horror novel for Universal ca. 1970, but this project never made it into production. He revived it while working for Paramount in the early 1970s, intending to make it after The Great Gatbsy, but to Clayton's great chagrin studio head Barry Diller wrongly assumed Clayton had lost interest in the film and gave it to Roman Polanski, without consulting Clayton. When he discovered this, Clayton phoned Diller and excoriated him for taking away a project that had been acquired specifically for him, and giving it to another director without his knowledge.

Another complicating factor in Clayton's career was that several film projects were cancelled without warning when pre-production was well advanced - in one case, just two weeks before shooting was to have started. Neil Sinyard nominates three major projects, Casualties of War, Fall Creek, and Silence, the successive failures of which reportedly devastated Clayton, and Clayton himself later speculated that these setbacks contributed to his later health problems:

• Casualties of War (Paramount, 1970) was a controversial Vietnam War drama, based on a true story by Daniel Lang, published in The New Yorker in 1969. The story concerns four American soldiers who are charged with the rape and murder of a young Vietnamese woman after one of their comrades (who had refused to take part in the crime) informs on them. An early script by Peter Hammill was rejected, and many leading writers were considered for the project, before novice screenwriter David Giler submitted a first-draft script that Clayton deemed "magnificent". According to Neil Sinyard, Paramount cancelled the film at the behest of the Pentagon, who feared that it might erode public support for the war effort. It was eventually made for Columbia by Brian De Palma in 1989, with Michael J. Fox in the lead role.

• Fall Creek (1976) was a 'revisionist' look at the American frontier, in a similar vein to contemporary "new wave westerns" like Little Big Man and McCabe & Mrs. Miller. The script by Larry McMurtry was adapted from the novel by Jessamyn West, and dealt with a notorious 1824 massacre of native Americans in Indiana, and the racial and political crisis that followed. The project was originally conceived with Robert Redford as the star, but Redford turmed yje projecty down. Larry McMurtry discusses the production in his book Hollywood: A Third Memoir, calling the screenplay "one of my better early scripts" and describing Clayton as "much the most fun" of any director he worked. In McMurtry's account, the project collapsed after producer David Merrick suffered a serious stroke that left him permanently confined to a wheelchair. Its cancellation was a bitter blow for Clayton, who was an ardent fan of the genre, and had long hoped to direct a western.

• Silence (Fox, 1977) was a contemporary urban thriller about racial tensions, based on the James Kennaway novel about a white man who escapes from a pursuing black gang by hiding out in the apartment of a mute African-American woman. The film was reportedly cancelled just two weeks before filming was scheduled to start, and according to Sinyard this was a devastating blow to Clayton. In a curious turn of events, Hollywood executive Barry Diller was responsible for the demise three of the films Clayton planned to make in the 1970s. In 1970 Clayton's film adaptation of Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes fell foul of a power struggle between Diller (who had just been appointed President of Paramount Pictures) and Paramount's head of production David Picker, and Diller cancelling the project. Five years later, Diller took The Tenant from Clayton without consulting him, and gave it to Roman Polanski. Finally, in 1977, Silence was cancelled just two weeks before it was due to go into production - ironically, again by Diller, who had recently left Paramount to become the head of 20th Century Fox.

In 1977, as compensation for the cancellation of Silence, Fox offered Clayton the chance to a new science fiction script co-credited to David Giler and Dan O'Bannon, but Clayton turned down the film (Alien), and it was ultimately given to Ridley Scott, who (like Sydney Pollack before him) scored a career-making hit. A few months later, Clayton suffered a major stroke which robbed him of the ability to speak. He was helped to recover by his wife Haya and a group of close friends, but he later revealed that he deliberately kept his condition quiet because he feared he might not get work again if his affliction became known. He did not commit to another assignment for five years.

• The Bourne Identity (1983) - after completing Something Wicked This Way Comes, Clayton was hired to direct a film adaptation of Robert Ludlum's best-selling espionage thriller. To play Jason Bourne, he signed Burt Reynolds - they had met several years earlier, while Clayton was working with Reynolds' then partner Sally Field for another unrealised project, and Clayton felt that Reynolds was a star whose acting potential had never been fully tapped. Unfortunately, the production was repeatedly postponed due to location issues and problems with Reynolds' schedule, and it went into "development hell" for almost 20 years before finally being made into the hit version with Matt Damon.

Something Wicked This Way Comes (1982-83)

Clayton's return to directing was another dream project that originated more than twenty years earlier, but which he had previously been unable to realise. Even before it came into Clayton's hands, the film version of Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes had a chequered history. Bradbury wrote the original short story in 1948, and in 1957 (reportedly after seeing Singing In The Rain some 40 times) Bradbury adapted it into a 70-page screen treatment and presented it as a gift to Gene Kelly. Clayton evidently met Bradbury ca. 1959 and expressed interest in directing the film, but Kelly was unable to raise the money to produce it, so Bradbury subsequently expanded the treatment into the novel version of the story, which was published in 1962.

According to a 1983 New York Times interview with Bradbury, he and Clayton reconnected and revived the project thanks to a pair of coincidental meetings. In 1969, while walking through Beverly Hills, Bradbury met Peter Douglas (the son of actor Kirk Douglas), who was hoping to become a movie producer; he asked Bradbury if he had any suitable screenplays, so Bradbury suggested "Something Wicked". Coincidentally, Clayton was having lunch with Kirk Douglas on the very same day, and when Douglas asked the director about films he might like to make, Clayton also mentioned Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Peter and Kirk Douglas then optioned the rights to the book, and Bradbury spent five months editing down his unwieldy 240-page script to a more feasible 120 pages. As noted above, the script was approved for production by Paramount, but at this point it fell foul of the power struggle between Paramount head of production, David Picker and the studio's new president Barry Diller. According to Bradbury's account, Picker loved the script, but Diller "hated anything Picker loved" so he ordered the production to be shut down. The normally mild-mannered Clayton later admitted that he was so enraged by Diller's decision that he put his fist through a Paramount office window.

in the early 1980s, after Clayton had recovered from his stroke, Peter Douglas was able to sell the project to the Disney studios, with Clayton again signed to direct. Unfortunately, the film was fraught with problems throughout its production. Clayton and Bradbury reportedly fell out after the director brought in British writer John Mortimer to do an uncredited rewrite of the screenplay. Clayton made the film as a dark thriller, which saw him to return to themes he had explored in earlier films - the supernatural, and the exposure of children to evil. However, when he submitted his original cut, the studio expressed strong reservations about its length and pacing, and its commercial potential, and Disney then took the unusual step of holding the film back from release for almost a year. Clayton was reportedly sidelined (although he retained his director credit) and Disney spent an additional six months, and some $5 million overhauling it, making numerous cuts and removing the original score (to make it more 'family-friendly'), and shooting new scenes (in some of which, because of the long delay caused by the reshoots, the two child stars were noticeably older and taller).

The version of the film that hit the screens in 1983 was a compromise between Disney's insistence on a commercial film with 'family' appeal, and Clayton's original, darker vision of the story. To reduce costs, original editor Argyle Nelson Jr was fired, and assistant editor Barry Gordon was promoted to replace him (resulting in the film's dual editor credit). Gordon was given the task of re-editing the film, and at Disney's insistence, he was obliged to remove some of Clayton's completed scenes. The most prominent casualty was the pioneering computer-generated animation sequence that was to have opened the film, which depicted the empty train bearing Dark's Carnival arriving in the town and magically unfolding itself into place. The much-heralded sequence (which was discussed in detail in a 1982 edition of Cinefantastique) would have been the first significant use of the new technology in a major Hollywood movie, but it was almost entirely deleted, and in the final cut, only one brief CGI shot was retained. Another Clayton sequence that was removed featured a giant disembodied hand that reached into the boys' room and tried to grab them - this was deleted by the studio on the grounds that the mechanical effect was not realistic enough, and it was replaced with a newly-filmed sequence in which the boys' room is invaded by spiders. (In 2012, co-star Shawn Carson recalled the harrowing experience of having to film the new scene, which was entirely done using real, live spiders). Bradbury was asked to write new opening narration (read by Arthur Hill) to help clarify the story, and new special effects were inserted, including the "cloud tank" storm effects.

Another major disappointment for Clayton and his musical collaborator, Georges Delerue was the loss of Delerue's original score, which Disney considered 'too dark' - it was removed at the studio's insistence, and replaced by a new score, written by American composer James Horner. Delerue's soundtrack (which the composer considered the best of the music he wrote for Hollywood films) remained unheard in the Disney vaults until 2011, when the studio unusually gave permission for the French Universal label to issue the original studio recordings on a limited edition CD (coupled with another unused Delerue score for Mike Nichols' Regarding Henry).

Final years

Clayton's last feature film was the British-made The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987), a film he had originally pitched in 1961. Adapted from his own novel by Brian Moore it starred Maggie Smith as a spinster who struggles with the emptiness of her life, and it again featured a score by Georges Delerue. It won Clayton critical plaudits for the first time in many years, and former collaborator Larry McMurtry described the film as "Brian Moore's best work, and perhaps Jack Clayton's too".

Clayton worked with Smith and Delerue again in 1992 for his final screen project, a feature-length BBC television adaptation of Memento Mori, based on the novel by Muriel Spark, for which he also co-wrote the screenplay and another project he nursed for many years. Like previous films, that film expressed quietly moving meditations on disappointment and ageing. The telemovie aired in April 1992, just a month after Georges Delerue died in Hollywood, aged 67.

Personal life

When asked his religion, he replied: "ex-Catholic". He was married three times, his third marriage being to the Israeli actress Haya Harareet, which lasted until his death. Clayton died in hospital in Slough, England from a heart attack, following a short illness, on 25 February 1995.

On the first anniversary of Clayton's death, BAFTA held a ceremony to celebrate his life and career, which featured a screening of The Bespoke Overcoat and a solo flute performance from Delerue's score for Something Wicked This Way Comes, which was a favourite of Clayton's wife Haya. Tributes were delivered by Sir John Woolf, Harold Pinter, Karel Reisz, Freddie Francis, Clayton's editor Terry Rawlings, his agent Robert Shapiro, and actors Sam Waterson and Scott Wilson, with whom he had worked on The Great Gatsby. In his professional tribute to Clayton, Harold Pinter said:

"Jack Clayton was a director of great sensitivity, intelligence and flair. He was a gentle man, with a quiet, wry sense of humour, but professionally he possessed the utmost rigour and a fierce determination. I wrote the screenplay of The Pumpkin Eater in 1963. It remains, in my view, a film of considerable power and, of course, absolute integrity."

Filmography

as director

• Room at the Top (Romulus Films, 1959)
• The Innocents (20th Century Fox, 1961)
• The Pumpkin Eater (1964)

References

• World Film Directors, Volume Two, 1945–1985. ed. J. Wakeman. pp 224–227. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1988.

External links

• Jack Clayton biography and credits at the BFI's Screenonline
• Literature on Jack Clayton
• Jack Clayton at IMDb